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The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
A Historical Analysis of the Failure
of the Black Leadership
By Harold Cruse
Reviewed by Arthur Tobier
"You are saved," cried Captain
Delano, more and more astonished and pained; "you are
saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?"
"The Negro," came Benito Cereno's
reply.
The two words resonate here still, in this
country of the mind, as Emerson called it.
Harold Cruse's first book will not assuage
the pain or the astonishment. We've learned too little from
history for that. But what the book should at the least for
many, even the most reluctant, is to suggest the passionate wish
of individual and nation to be, and immutably connected
with this, the passionate sense of failure. And at the most,
The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual might fix into our
sensibility how complicated it is to create a self of substance.
In this book--at times brilliant, sometimes
shrill, but seldom unimportant--we are in the presence of a man
freeing himself from the abstractions that have attempted to
shape him into an abstraction: a man who wants not only to know
who he is but who is acting to extend that knowledge
existentially, and who insists on establishing his own field of
vision. It is, in part, a book about the crises of the
intellectual community whatever its shading. "Who knows but
that, on the lower frequencies," Ellison's Invisible Man
ends, "I speak for you." Cruse doesn't presume to be
Ellison's narrator, but obviously, just as Ellison's novel ten
years ago prefigured the riots of Watts and Detroit and Newark,
it prefigured the coming of Harold Cruse.
Born in Virginia, he came of age in
Manhattan. he writes about Negro artists, and Harlem in the
1920's, and in all the decades since (for 40 years unable to
extend itself intellectually); about the "cultural
compulsives" of Jewish and Protestant intellectuals; about
chauvinistic West Indians, and the Communist Party; about social
realism, integrationism, nationalism, separatism, black powerism;
about the images of the mass media; about the theater of
illusions and the illusions of economic change and political
reform; and the intrusions of the politics of culture on the
imagination of creative intellectuals. Layer upon layer of
disciplined abstraction into which Harold Cruse and others were
folded and left to muddle through to their own voice.
We all do strange things with our voices when
we find them. Cruse uses his to dissent. There are moments when
he loses control of his voice and it records only what he so
capably exposes elsewhere--the closed-off world of leftwing
ideological and political onanism. And then his voice sounds
like this: "The special function of the Negro intellectual
is a cultural one. He should take to the rostrum and assail the
stultifying blight of the commercially depraved white
middle-class who has poisoned the structural roots of the
American people into a nation of intellectual dolts. he should
explain the economic and institutional causes of this American
cultural depravity. He should tell black America how and why
Negroes are trapped in this cultural degeneracy, and how it has
dehumanized their essential identity, squeezed the lifeblood of
their inherited cultural ingredients out of them, and then
relegated them to cultural slums."
But when he permits himself to listen to his
own mind, for undertones and further meanings, he writes:
"It is perfectly understandable why many new Afro-American
Nationalists in the cities of the North must experience a
separatist mood of withdrawal from any or all contacts with the
white world. The historical character of black and white social
relations in America makes such a mood a prerequisite for
positive reexamination and reevaluation of the black
personality. For groups as well as individuals it is often
necessary to retreat."
Cruse criticizes both current integrationist
and separatist philosophies. Integrationism, he insists, is
still only integration, "and the dynamics of
integration are its social aims. the integrationist philosophy
sees Negro ghettos as products of racial segregation that should
not even exist. Hence nothing in the traditions of ghettos is
worth preserving even when ghettos do exist in actuality."
Black power he sees as self-defeating from the other end and he
perceives its being reduced to a game of dozens: "I'm
blacker than you, and so is my mama, so I'm purer than you and
your mama. therefore I am also more nationalistic than you, and
more politically trustworthy than you and your mama, in the
interests of Black Power." But most important of all, I
think, for the audience Cruse is addressing are his insights
into the connections between Booker T. Washington, Marcus
Garvey, and W.E.B. DuBois, whom he calls the Big Three, and how
their work has been misconstrued.
Cruse convinces with his intelligence and
strength of mind in each of the 28 essays that make up the book.
But he might have done well to make more than just this one book
out of his material. It isn't meant to detract from its
achievement to say that The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
is not well edited. The book knows a great deal about what is
happening now in Harlem (and perhaps by extension in Watts and
Detroit and Newark and Chicago). But it wanders, it repeats, it
moves from detached observation to polemic and back, it compels,
insists, and overstates, often without support. This is
particularly noticeable in Cruse's discussion of economics.
And I disagree with Cruse's argument that the
only original element in American culture is Negro music.
Language and humor from all sections of the country, as
Constance Rourke's work has shown, have helped shape American
character at least as much as jazz. To insist on the primacy of
any one aesthetic is to be held down by an act of will. but I
would prefer to guess that Cruse knows this. His central concern
says he does. The theme that weaves its way throughout the book
is the attention that must be paid the plural experience in
America.
For the author, the key to extending the
society and each of us, is to establish cultural democracy. He
finds it absent outside the intellectual community. To
democratize the cultural apparatus [and Cruse feels it cannot be
accomplished without serious and creative effort by Negro
intellectuals now in their twenties and thirties] is tantamount
to revolutionizing American society into realizing its professed
ideals. Either we find all groups speak for themselves and for
the nation, or American nationality will never be
determined." Revolution? Seems to me that's where we came
in. What Cruse is saying is that the revolution is to discover
America.
Arthur Tobier was on the staff of the Center for Urban
Education in New York.
Source: Commonweal (1968)
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updated
22 April 2009 |
